Exploring counterintuitive results from my n=1 study.
Medical journals, successful people’s biographies, even the alt-nutrition people who eat raw liver: the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that sleeping ~7 hours a night consistently is the best thing you can do for your long-term health. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself — sleeping less for a few nights makes you feel terrible, like you can’t even focus properly the next day.
But have you checked?
Background
A while back, I became interested in the Quantified Self movement, where people track a lot of data on themselves and run “n-of-1” studies, where they make a life change and measure how effective the change was. Experiments can ask questions like “does a light breakfast make me less tired in the afternoon?” or “Does melatonin actually help me sleep better?” (from Gwern)
I found these studies cool because they could actually be scientifically rigorous, actually blocking the experimenter from knowing which condition they’re doing that day (blinding), or determining results not by “feels better” but by actually calculating the significance of their results. I also liked how it reinforces the fact that health is intensely personal, and that not all lifestyle changes will help everyone the same way.
